Discourse as a Strategy of Justification: Techniques of Neutralization in the Russian Presidential Account of the War in Ukraine

While neutralization techniques have been extensively studied in relation to individual offenders, they have received considerably less attention in discourses produced by high-level state actors. This article addresses this gap by examining the official speeches of the Russian president on the war in Ukraine. It analyses the presence, frequency and discursive forms of the five classical neutralization techniques, raising the question of whether these techniques, originally conceived for interpersonal contexts, can also be identified in discourses emanating from institutional levels. The results show a systematic use of neutralization techniques in 86 per cent of the speeches. The findings reveal that in this institutional context, these techniques function predominantly as anticipatory justificatory frameworks that normalize violence before it occurs, rather than as mere post-hoc rationalizations. This supports the concept of “vertical neutralization”, a top-down process of moral legitimation, and suggests that the Russian president’s discourse has contributed to creating a fertile climate for the perpetration of international crimes.